At the Sinny: Encounters at the End of the World

Encounters at the End of the World is Werner Herzog's latest film and is currently showing at Sundance here in Madison. I took it in last night and came away in awe and feeling ever so small & insignificant.

Herzog and his crew venture to the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica and find the station populated by an assortment of dreamers who are surrounded by some very beautiful, though very dangerous terrain. The South Pole is quite literally the end of the world as the only place you can go is north. But it also a terminus in other ways. For one, it was the last bit of the earth to have been explored. The Amundsens, Scotts, and Shackletons, of the world ensured that final terra incognita was opened to the probing eyes of humanity and that there were no blank spots left on maps. In another, even more terminal sense, the signs of global warming, some of which are studied at McMurdo, portend mankind's ultimate fate.



While "research station" is singular, McMurdo is really a sprawling complex of buildings and pipes. Herzog notes the station's ugliness and that it resembles a construction site. Indeed, there is a constant flow of machinery digging up the earth. Our narrator also notes his distaste for life in the complex which includes aerobics & yoga classes and an ATM. I was reminded of canoeing down the Wisconsin River and seeing people camped along the shore (probably from Illinois) with all the amenities of home – big camping trailers with beds and toilets, portable TVs, etc. Herzog cannot wait to get away from McMurdo, infested as it is, with all the trappings of modern civilization.

Moving away from the station, the filmmakers encounter vulcanologists studying an active volcano as well as a group who has set out to learn how a particular type of seal survives the harsh conditions. Elsewhere, cell biologist Samuel Bowser is found in a pensive mood as he prepares for his final dive before moving on and ceding his pursuit to a younger generation of researchers. Bowser describes the microbial life below as if they were monsters – with vicious-looking mandibles, tentacles just waiting to ensnare prey, et al. It is a brutish and violent life for them, he observes. Herzog asks him if this is why creatures, such as our distant ancestors, left the sea, to escape the Hobbesian world of the oceans. Bowser says it is quite probable. However, there is also a unicellular organism which the biologist says exhibits all the traits of intelligent life that we humans use to distinguish ourselves from lower forms. Depending on how you look at it, this can be an amazing tribute to a small creature or an ego-shrinking revelation for a hairless ape. There's little doubt that Herzog, who once opined "I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder" found a kindred spirit in Bowser.

But the director also found himself equally at home with other "professional dreamers" that he encountered. Stephan Pashov may be a philosopher and fork lift driver but he's at McCurdo driving a Caterpillar. A young PhD candidate in linguistics tends the greenhouse and relates how languages are being lost and no one seems to care. For his part, Herzog bemoans the general acceptance of tree huggers while the death of languages, of culture goes on almost uncontested. But this will all be moot if mankind destroys the environment and itself. Herzog spends some time wondering what some future alien archaeologist would make of what we leave behind.



We meet several people and a common refrain for their presence at the end of the earth is that they were refugees from their former lives. These people just have a deep seated need to be somewhere else. In addition to the cast of characters, there is, of course, the land and seas. There are mountains, the aforementioned volcano, glaciers, and the water. The underwater scenes are incredible in their stark beauty but also their cold remoteness. They sustain life in a variety of forms yet are inhospitable to humans who abandoned it long ago in favor of solid ground.

A lot of viewers will surely latch onto the "insane" penguin who wanders away from his own kind to die alone on the icy wasteland. However symbolic this scene may be, the one that really stuck in my head as reflecting Herzog's dour take on things was the survival training sequence. Before leaving the camp, everyone must take a survival training class where intrepid adventurers learn to build igloos and how to affect a rescue of someone lost in a blizzard. One exercise involved a group going out to search for a colleague who has not returned from the outhouse. To simulate whiteout conditions, the trainees have white buckets over their heads. One by one they file out of a shack holding onto a rope. The leader is supposed to head towards the outhouse but ends up veering way off course. Had this been done under extreme weather conditions, their colleague would probably have frozen to death as the group wandered aimlessly in a circle.

Admittedly, a scene of several people blindly struggling in the midst of a training exercise has none of the fatal beauty of a lone penguin waddling towards an ominous mountain range on the horizon where his fate is most certainly death. Nor does the scene compare to the shot of the bioluminescent sea cucumber thingy that ends the film. But there was just something about a group of smart people with buckets on their heads aimlessly bumping into one another as global warming rages on.